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A review by bluestjuice
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
3.0
Go look up a townscape painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Go do it, I'll wait. That level of intricacy, complication, detail, richness? It's the best metaphor I can come up with for Quicksilver.
I read this in several chunks, over a span of ten months. It's enormous. It's not overly burdened by the weight of its plot: which is not to say that it has none, but rather that what plot it has meanders hither and yon and pauses for lengthy interludes and is none too interested in such mundanities as narrative arc. This is historical fiction, but the history is emphasized much more than the fiction, and even the history is really only there as a convenient reason to introduce musings on topics so varied and seemingly tangential that it can take awhile to notice that really, they are the point of the book. Stephenson loves to write about what he loves to know about, and if you can tolerate the mannerism, much of what he has to say is illuminating or fascinating or absolutely entertaining. It can also, in the right mood, be maddening, baffling, confusing, and make it impossible to engage in his story. In the vast span of time I spent dealing with (or sometimes, at length, specifically-not-dealing-with) this book, I experienced all these reactions and more.
Perversely, it's now at the finishing of it that I'm most charmed by its idiosyncratic personality. Like a prisoner with Stockholm Syndrome, I rationalize: I could absolutely pick up the next book in the series. Parts of this book were absolutely grand! Let us just forget about all those nights I slogged painfully through a few scant pages, barely keeping my eyes open, because the topic of the hour didn't happen to capture my attention. Let me internalize any fault standing between this work of incontrovertible genius and my enjoyment of it: if I found it dull or difficult or uninteresting at any time, let us assume it is because I am not sufficiently intelligent or a sophisticated-enough reader. Let me take another dosage as a penance, an effort to elevate my mind, and trust nothing to my discernment as a reader of literature.
Or, not. Instead, despite my inclination to push onward, I'm going to at the very least take a good long break and read some other sort of work. Quicksilver is a very particular literary experience, and I enjoyed parts of it very much. I think it is a much better piece of writing than you would credit it with, to judge by my three-star rating. I have tried to balance my judgement of the work with my enjoyment of it as a reader, but in the end I have weighted my enjoyment more, because these ratings are a display of the books I like as well as what books I think have merit. Quicksilver is great, but like Breugel paintings, their composition is less to me than the sum of their parts. I could look at them endlessly but would not care to hang them on my wall.
I read this in several chunks, over a span of ten months. It's enormous. It's not overly burdened by the weight of its plot: which is not to say that it has none, but rather that what plot it has meanders hither and yon and pauses for lengthy interludes and is none too interested in such mundanities as narrative arc. This is historical fiction, but the history is emphasized much more than the fiction, and even the history is really only there as a convenient reason to introduce musings on topics so varied and seemingly tangential that it can take awhile to notice that really, they are the point of the book. Stephenson loves to write about what he loves to know about, and if you can tolerate the mannerism, much of what he has to say is illuminating or fascinating or absolutely entertaining. It can also, in the right mood, be maddening, baffling, confusing, and make it impossible to engage in his story. In the vast span of time I spent dealing with (or sometimes, at length, specifically-not-dealing-with) this book, I experienced all these reactions and more.
Perversely, it's now at the finishing of it that I'm most charmed by its idiosyncratic personality. Like a prisoner with Stockholm Syndrome, I rationalize: I could absolutely pick up the next book in the series. Parts of this book were absolutely grand! Let us just forget about all those nights I slogged painfully through a few scant pages, barely keeping my eyes open, because the topic of the hour didn't happen to capture my attention. Let me internalize any fault standing between this work of incontrovertible genius and my enjoyment of it: if I found it dull or difficult or uninteresting at any time, let us assume it is because I am not sufficiently intelligent or a sophisticated-enough reader. Let me take another dosage as a penance, an effort to elevate my mind, and trust nothing to my discernment as a reader of literature.
Or, not. Instead, despite my inclination to push onward, I'm going to at the very least take a good long break and read some other sort of work. Quicksilver is a very particular literary experience, and I enjoyed parts of it very much. I think it is a much better piece of writing than you would credit it with, to judge by my three-star rating. I have tried to balance my judgement of the work with my enjoyment of it as a reader, but in the end I have weighted my enjoyment more, because these ratings are a display of the books I like as well as what books I think have merit. Quicksilver is great, but like Breugel paintings, their composition is less to me than the sum of their parts. I could look at them endlessly but would not care to hang them on my wall.